Communist Insurgency Gaining Strength Amid Philippines Chaos

DALTON PASS, LUZON, PHILIPPINES — The guerrillas planned the roadblock perfectly. When truck driver Romulo Gueta saw them in his headlights, he knew there was nowhere to go and nothing to do but stop and face their demands.

Gueta was inching uphill in first gear and could neither outrun nor outmaneuver them. The encounter was brief and bloodless.

They ''asked'' for a contribution. Gueta handed over his money. They told him not to tell the authorities about the incident. Gueta agreed. The guerrillas waved him on. And in his rear view mirror Gueta saw them vanish into the thick underbrush.

A year later Gueta recounted the event as he approached the site for the first time since it happened. He said it was a fact of life that guerrillas of the communist New People's Army operate with seeming impunity in these rugged hills less than 100 miles north of Manila.

There has been communist insurgence in central Luzon since the first cells were formed in 1938. Since then their numbers have gone up and down in direct relation to the health of the national economy and the effectiveness of government campaigns to quash the insurgents.

Washington's major concern these days about the situation is not solely that the number of guerrillas is at an all-time high and climbing. Just as troubling to American civilian and military analysts is the public attitude President Ferdinand Marcos and his top advisers maintain toward the problem -- mainly that it isn't a problem.

Last July, Marcos said there were no more than 6,500 communist guerrillas in the entire country and that they posed no threat. Yet Marcos to this day defends his rule by decree, with arrest and indefinite detention and suspension of habeas corpus ''because of the continuing threat to our country of the communist insurgency.''

Marianito Sawit is one of Marcos' ''special advisers'' on security. In an interview before the recent election, Sawit said, ''The NPA threat is not actual. It is only being magnified in the foreign press.''

Brig. Gen. Eduardo Ermito is the army's leading spokesman on the guerrilla war. He said in a recent interview that American estimates of the NPA's strength are too high. As of last December, the NPA had no more than 10,000 men and women under arms, he said. The entire population of the Philippines is 55 million.

A report delivered to the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee late last year, however, placed the NPA strength at between 18,000 and 20,000 armed soldiers. An American analyst based in Manila said last month that U.S. concern was not just the number of guerrillas but their increasing strength.

General Ermito disagrees. He pointed out that the government successfully dealt with a communist insurgency in the 1950s and, more recently, it subdued secessionists in the resource-rich province of Mindanao. Ermito's said the ''momentum'' is clearly in the government's favor:

''In 1984 there was a daily average of four NPA killed and in '85 that went to an average of seven. Also in '85 the number of government-initiated actions exchanges of fire resulted in the death of 2,017 guerrillas.''

Ermito adds a series of qualifications to his optimistic evaluation while admitting the insurgency is growing. ''At the end of 1984 the NPA had about 10,000 to 12,000 men, only about two-thirds of which were armed,'' he said. ''In 1985, the number is maybe 13,000.''

Ermito said the NPA has infiltrated about 5 percent of the Barangays, or neighborhoods, of the country. American experts, however, insist the communists have penetrated at least 20 percent of the neighborhoods. Marcos has denied the NPA is growing at all.

Foreign analysts believe that uncounted thousands are waiting to enlist in the NPA. The major constraint on the group's growth, these analysts say, is its inability to obtain weapons.

''They are getting no support from outside in terms of war materials,'' Ermito said.

An NPA strategy paper given to The Orlando Sentinel by a sympathizer in Manila two weeks ago stated that the organization arms itself exclusively through the capture of weapons and supplies from government forces.

The NPA's lack of foreign support is a unique characteristic of the Philippine communist insurgency. On one level, it is designed to deny Washington an excuse for military intervention. But the origins of this strategy sprang from a bitter split between the country's pro-Soviet Philippine Communist Party, founded in 1938, and the Maoist Communist Party of the Philippines, established in 1968 by Jose Sison.

There had been reports that Vietnam approached the NPA with offers of material assistance last year. According to intelligence reports accepted by both Philippines and U.S. analysts, the NPA turned down the offer primarily because it did not want to incur the obligation to the Soviet Union that acceptance of the Vietnamese offer would bring.

The same analysts say there is no indication that China has ever offered the NPA support of any kind.